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Friday, June 10, 2011

Film shoot of a Danish-Malaysian co-production 2

After going through the first three days of the shoot from the 3rd to the 5th of June (chronicled yesterday). We all knew that the worst was over. It was an exhausting shoot, insanely high temperature, merciless mosquitoes, seasickness, unpredictable conditions and the like. Filmmaking, some should remember, is a high-stress job that involves a lot of dealing with people, especially if you are shooting under circumstances where you need the cooperation from the locals at the locations of your shoot.

6th of June came. This was scheduled to be the last day of the shoot.

Fern the lead actress drew a caricature of me.

It's not everyday you have the lead actress of a film you're doing drawing a caricature of yourself.

There was no need to wake up that early like previous days. Call time was in the afternoon.

Once we were done with that, we headed off to the nearby village for another scene. Supposedly the last scene of the day.

Fern's shirt was so wet, we had to dry it on the way to the village. Here's how we did it.

With the help of the folks in the village, we were finally done.

Baby Ira wasn't happy that it ended so soon.

We then left the village.

I returned to the apartment and went through an editing session with Jeppe and Ming Jin. (prior to that, I was assembling and editing the footage every night after the shoot) We decided scenes we needed to add, stuff we left out etc. The process lasted til 3 in the morning.

We slept and woke up the next day to do a few additional shots.

Because of some conditions, the audio equipment occasionally acting up and stuff, there were some scenes that needed ADR (dubbing), or foleying. So we went to a lagoon to make our own sound effects. The sound of water splashing, people jumping into the sea, people swimming, an intense fighting scene etc. We did it all like this.

It ended in the evening.

With everything done, we packed hurriedly and left Cherating that night.

It was one of the more grueling shoots I've went through. Like life, there are a lot of ups and downs, but thankfully, there are much more ups than downs. The film will be good, anything less than that will be failure.